Romney, yes and no
In all the political coverage about the candidates, I’ve picked out two particularly interesting ones on Mitt Romney that look at the former governor in very different light.
National Review Online has endorsed him.
Unlike some other candidates in the race, Romney is a full-spectrum conservative: a supporter of free-market economics and limited government, moral causes such as the right to life and the preservation of marriage, and a foreign policy based on the national interest. While he has not talked much about the importance of resisting ethnic balkanization — none of the major candidates has — he supports enforcing the immigration laws and opposes amnesty. Those are important steps in the right direction.
The endorsement goes through the editors’ opinions of the other Republican candidates. Which lead them back to Romney, for their own reasons.
Romney is an intelligent, articulate, and accomplished former businessman and governor. At a time when voters yearn for competence and have soured on Washington because too often the Bush administration has not demonstrated it, Romney offers proven executive skill. He has demonstrated it in everything he has done in his professional life, and his tightly organized, disciplined campaign is no exception.
It’s the business and executive skills Romney exhibits that concern at least one analyst in this commentary in the Wall Street Journal.
In a recent cover profile in The Weekly Standard by the magazine’s Fred Barnes, Mr. Romney is portrayed as the man who would be the CEO of America. Says Mr. Barnes, quoting Mr. Romney, a Harvard M.B.A.: “His idea of the perfect deal is not when one side wins but when ‘you find a new alternative that everybody agrees is the right way to go. That doesn’t always happen.’ “…
Mr. Barnes says Mr. Romney’s “approach to government is not ideological.” A Romney adviser is quoted as saying of his candidate: “He’s super-pragmatic. He’s an eclectic conservative.” And Mr. Romney himself says flatly that as president he would “insist on gathering data . . . and analyze the data looking for trends.”
Which is how this commentator sees things going wrong.
Yet the Romney approach as described not only by Mr. Barnes but more importantly by Mr. Romney himself is an approach that goes far beyond any particular issue. It is, as Mr. Romney himself freely admits, all about process. Whatever the issue–economic, social or national security–Mr. Romney would gather the data, look for a trend and thus “you make better decisions.”
What’s wrong with that? Principles matter as much as data. Or more…
A principle presidency always trumps a process presidency. Lincoln did better than Hoover, Reagan did better than Bush I or Carter. Better heading in the right direction with a faulty process than zipping along in the wrong direction simply because the process and the data are telling you things are wonderfully efficient. A train making exceptional time to Boston is useless if in fact you wanted to go to Miami.
Nobody seems very clear on where the races – or the parties – are going right now.
